My October 2008 column has been published in ;login:. This month it’s about Solaris System Analysis – detailed steps to take to determine why a system is “slow” or “busted”. Some ;login: contents is freely available at ;login:, but my column this month is not one of them. I’ve posted the .pdf here for those without a USENIX membership (although I strongly recommend you get one if you are interested in all things Unix).

The wiki that started with my August 2008 column will be expanded (as soon as I get the time) to include this new content. It’s very lonely having a wiki of one, so please consider contributing your thoughts to what I’ve started. It would be a great advance in systems administration if there was a canonocal source of first-step debugging information, and hopefully you will help make this wiki that source: http://wiki.sage.org/bin/view/Main/AllThingsSun

Thought you might like to check out the blog of Avi Silberschatz – very good stuff. If you don’t know, Avi is Chairman of the C.S. Department at Yale U, and coauthor of our Operating Systems Concepts textbooks.